Spring is sprung

Taken in Nicci’s and Sean’s Suffolk garden this afternoon.

Google’s email sca…, er, scheme

Google plans to finance its new ‘free’ email service by smart advertising. I had naively assumed the targeting would be done by reading the message headers. But no: it seems the company plans to machine-scan the content of messages. This makes Gmail a non-starter for people like me. And a consortium of privacy activists have written to the company to express a similar view.

In the words of this report,

“A coalition of 28 privacy and civil liberties groups wrote Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page a letter Tuesday urging them to think again about the service, which they said sets potentially dangerous precedents for the automated scanning of private communications. The service may conflict with European privacy laws, and should be suspended until privacy issues are addressed, they wrote.

The letter’s signatories include the World Privacy Forum, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Bits of Freedom, the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Foundation for Information Policy Research and Privacy International.

When Google announced the Gmail service on March 31, the Mountain View, Calif., company said it will scan the text of all incoming e-mail in order to place appropriate advertisements. This is a bad idea, according to the privacy campaigners, because ‘The scanning of confidential email violates the implicit trust of an email service provider’.”

Broadband’s impact on TV

From an article in The Register:

Nights in front of the TV could become a thing of the past as more and more people get hooked up to broadband.

More than half of those quizzed in a recent survey said they spent less time in front of the goggle box since getting broadband. Instead, they’re staring at a monitor all night and doing stuff online.

Strategy Analytics surveyed 800 European broadband users and discovered that 56 per cent spent less, or a lot less, time watching television since subscribing to broadband.

In its report Broadcasters Beware: Broadband Is Stealing Your Viewers, the firm warns that TV broadcasters are losing millions of viewers to broadband Internet services.

“Television is clearly suffering the most from the rapid growth of broadband,” said analyst David Mercer. “A growing number of viewers are now choosing to spend their spare time communicating online and finding entertainment on the Internet, rather than sitting in front of the TV set. TV companies need to face up to this reality and start preparing for the brave new world of broadband entertainment.”